June 19 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. military services offered
glimpses yesterday of how they will deliver on the Pentagon’s
pledge to let women apply for front-line combat positions, and
of the challenges in devising new, gender-neutral standards for
warriors.

Army Rangers and Navy SEALs are among the special-operations units that are considering accepting female
candidates, military officials said at a Pentagon briefing.

“I remain confident that we will retain the trust and
confidence of the American people by opening positions to women,
while ensuring that all members entering these newly opened
positions can meet the standards required to maintain our
warfighting capability,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said in
a May 21 memo that was released yesterday along with planning
documents from the services.

The military services and the Special Operations Command
are beginning a year of research and scientific studies intended
to design and test fitness and other standards that can be
applied uniformly, without weakening them for women. The moves
could mean that as many as 237,000 combat positions previously
not available to women would be open to them by January 2016 as
the military acts on policy changes set in motion at the start
of this year by Hagel’s predecessor, Leon Panetta.

That includes specific jobs that previously were closed to
women as well as entire military occupations, such as infantry,
armor and special operations, that haven’t been open to female
troops, Juliet Beyler, the Defense Department’s director of
officer and enlisted personnel management, said at the briefing.

Army, Marines

The Army plans to re-evaluate the physical and mental
performance standards used for all military occupational
specialties, especially those that have been closed to women,
according to an Army memo that was among the documents released
yesterday. The validation of gender-neutral standards for the
Army Ranger School is due by July 1, 2015, with a decision on
standards for armor and infantry specialties no later than
September 2015.

The Marine Corps has determined that more than 250 of the
service’s 335 military occupational specialties are physically
demanding and has begun testing male and female Marines on those
tasks, Colonel John Aytes, head of the military policy branch of
the Marine Corps, said at the briefing.

Military veterans such as Billy Birdzell, a former Marine
Corps infantry officer and special operations team leader,
agreed yesterday that developing uniform standards will be a
difficult task.

One Standard

“We have one shooting standard, one swimming standard, one
standard for driving Humvees,” Birdzell, who’s pursuing a
graduate degree at Georgetown University in Washington, said
yesterday in an interview. “If we are going to have women be
able to do every single job as a man -- with the same pay and
benefits -- then they should be held to every one of those
single standards.”

Still, the military services should maintain the separate
physical standards they now apply for women in non-combat roles,
said retired California Air National Guard Major Mary Hegar, who
was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Purple Heart
for service as a combat rescue pilot in Afghanistan.

“There’s no clear-cut answer to the question, ‘How many
push-ups does it take to pull a man from a burning truck?’”
Hegar said in an interview. “Does the number go down from 42 to
38? I don’t know.”

The military branches can request exemptions to continue
barring women from certain specialties and the defense secretary
would decide whether to make such exceptions, Pentagon officials
said in January.

Special Operations

Opening jobs to women in the Special Operations Command is
an area where “much work remains to be done,” Admiral William
McRaven, head of the command, wrote in a March 22 memo released
yesterday, adding a note of caution on efforts to add women to
the ranks.

Commandos operate in “small, self-contained teams that
usually typify our operations, many of which are in austere,
politically sensitive environments for extended periods.” Those
aspects are being studied, McRaven wrote.

The Special Operations Command plans to survey its current
troops on their concerns about adding women to their units,
Major General Bennet Sacolick, director of force management for
the command, said at the Pentagon briefing.

“I hear the rank-and-file. Their concerns are, you know,
once again, that you got a 12-men” unit and “what are the
implications there?” Sacolick said. He cited “privacy issues”
and health and welfare concerns for “female operators in an
austere environment.”

Lines Erased

The survey will be similar to a study done among soldiers
before the Defense Department lifted its ban on gays openly
serving in the military.

Women, who make up about 15 percent of the military’s 1.4
million active-duty personnel, increasingly have been exposed to
combat as terrorism and unconventional warfare have erased the
traditional front lines of battle. Women also fly combat
aircraft, including helicopters and carrier-based Navy fighters,
and the Navy has begun assigning women to duty on submarines.

More than 280,000 women have deployed over the past decade
in support of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, according to the
Pentagon. At least 144 female troops have been killed in those
wars, out of more than 6,600 U.S. dead, and more than 860 women
have been wounded, according to the Pentagon.

Sexual Assaults

The debate over expanding combat roles for women is
unfolding even as the military copes with what Hagel has called
a “huge problem” of sexual assaults. The two issues may be
related, Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, said in January.

By eliminating the distinction that only men are treated as
warriors, Dempsey said, “I have to believe, the more we can
treat people equally, the more likely they are to treat each
other equally.”

Dempsey’s observation rings true for Hegar, the combat
rescue pilot, who’s a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the
military’s exclusion of women from combat roles.

“I was forward-deployed with plenty of stinky men in ways
we couldn’t shower, and I wasn’t assaulted or embarrassed or
anything like that,” Hegar said. “It’s all about accepting
that we cannot legislate behavior, but it’s a military order and
discipline and it’s a leadership thing.”